Coinciding with the start of the World Series, Western Mass. author and Springfield College professor Marty Dobrow has released his second book, a baseball offering titled "Knocking on Heaven’s Door: Six Minor Leaguers in Search of the Baseball Dream."

Four of the six players Dobrow spotlights in the book are familiar to Western Mass. baseball fans: former Red Sox pitcher Manny Delcarmen, Springfield’s Doug Clark, Leyden’s Brad Baker and Pittsfield ’s Matt Torra.

All week long, we’ll be featuring excerpts from Dobrow’s book, as well as posting exclusive video interviews with the author himself.

On April 12 at 1:45, Brad looked out the window of his math class and saw the parade of cars starting to arrive for Pioneer’s season opener against the Greenfield Green Wave. He had expected some scouts to be there. The Orioles, Yankees, and Cubs had expressed special interest. The Red Sox told him that they would be on hand to see every pitch he threw all season long. Still, the turnout was startling. All thirty major league teams were represented. Like beauty pageant judges, the scouts watched every move of his warm-up. He then pitched four innings, a firing squad of Stalker radar guns aiming at him every time he cocked his arm. When he was given the rest of the game off by coach Dexter Ross, the caravan of scouts disappeared.

All spring the insanity continued. Ross wound up changing the message on his home answering machine to include the date of Brad’s next start. Scouts would show up at the Pioneer guidance office to glean what they could about Brad’s character. One appeared at Mim’s Market, a general store in Northfield, and asked about the Bakers’ financial status, trying to gauge Brad’s “signability.” They made it to game after game, sitting among the starstruck Little Leaguers and local geezers like Charlie Lopinsky, who always wore a blue and white Barbara Mandrell hat atop his polyester ensemble. Brad rolled right through it, throwing shutout inning after shutout inning, talking politely to the scouts afterward, then driving Ashley home in his 1991 Dodge Spirit. It was one shining day after another. He had accepted an offer of a full scholarship from the University of Florida. His right arm was insured for a million dollars by American Specialty Underwriters. On the mound he was just about untouchable: 7-0 with a 0.67 ERA, 114 strikeouts in fifty-two innings.

The thirty-fifth year of the Major League Baseball draft was set to begin on Tuesday afternoon, June 2, 1999. Unlike the NFL and NBA drafts, which had already become national media bonanzas, the baseball draft was still an underground event with a cult following. The culmination of millions of miles of scouting trips, psychological questionnaires, and intelligence-gathering missions into guidance offices and general stores, the draft played out by conference call. It was a form of baseball speed dating, as each team’s general manager, scouting director, national cross-checkers, and scouting staff huddled in “war rooms,” where they were required to make each selection within two minutes. It went on for fifty rounds over two days, culling the top 1,500 high school seniors, junior college stars, and juniors and seniors at four-year colleges from the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico.

Tuesday morning was sparkling, plenty warm by ten o’clock, when Brad took Jim Masteralexis and Steve McKelvey fishing on the Green River, not far from the covered bridge. He baited Jim’s hook and watched him get his first cast tangled around a rock. Brad quickly felt the tug of a sixteen-inch rainbow trout and handed the rod to Jim, letting his agent reel in the big one.

By lunchtime Baker Hill was abuzz. Relatives, neighbors, and high school teammates were hovering in and around Brad’s house. Local reporters, some toting their own cameras, scrawled notes on steno pads. Vicki Baker stepped outside to snap photos of the TV trucks that had driven up from Springfield, pointing their satellite dishes to the heavens.

Just before one o’clock Brad climbed up to the loft, white socks peering from between his black trousers and dress shoes. Game balls in cases lined a bookshelf. The walls were covered with posters: Lou Gehrig, Pamela Anderson, a Porsche Speedster. He booted up his computer and watched as two other high school seniors were selected with the top two picks: Josh Hamilton from North Carolina was taken first by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, followed by Josh Beckett of Texas by the Florida Marlins.

The first round came and went, thirty players, none of them Brad. He came downstairs, got a glass of water, mingled with the crowd. Then he plopped down in a rocking chair just beneath the black bear mounted on the wall and beside a prom photo of him and Ashley all aglow. He waited. Everyone waited.

When the phone rang, Brad lifted himself out of the chair, walked purposefully toward the kitchen, and picked up the receiver. He was polite on the phone, soft-spoken, betraying no emotion. His end of the call was filled with uh-huhs, an okay or two, a thank you very much. Then he hung up as the crowd’s eyes bore in on him. He offered up exactly two words: “Red Sox.” The place almost exploded with joy.

When the hugs and high fives settled down, the Baker clan breathed in the new reality. Brad talked to a giddy crew of local reporters. Jeff Baker sat in his wheelchair beaming beneath his Red Sox cap. Jim Baker called it “the greatest day of my life.”

(All excerpts from Knocking on Heaven's Door: Six Minor Leaguers in Search of the Baseball Dream, 2010, by Marty Dobrow, are copyrighted.)